I have a project in protools that has several tempo changes. Protools 7x midi editing/arranging sucks mightily in comparison to FL & so I used FL9 as a rewire client to put together some drums for it. Then, I dump out the midi data, suck that into protools & let it play as a track (I'm using Addictive Drums & don't need anything FL specific).

The project grew and CPU power being what it is, it became impractical to run fl as a rewire client to fiddle with the drum arrangement so I made a stem mix of the protools session & brought it into FL for tweaking.

I created a tempo map using automation & got the drums to play along & change tempo properly. No big deal.

Then, I brought in the stem to FL & dropped it down as an audio clip. This is all fine until I need to back up four bars or something at which point the audio is all out of place unless I go all the way back & play from the top of the tune. This is not conducive to auditioning drum loops.

I've tried a bunch of different things to make this all work together nicely but it seems to be super overly complicated because I'm sitting here 2 hours later wondering if I've missed something fundamental. I ended up carving the audio into different clips & dropping those in the right place & now the slower parts play at a lower pitch even though I thought I'd told them not to.

This is all a super pain because all I wanted to do was drop in the stem & edit my drums arrangement.

Now, this might be my inability to find the right documentation but I've looked through some forum posts & it seems that this is an issue for other people as well. If I missed something please point it out to me.

I would like it if FL didn't try to lock you into having one tempo for a project. I know it's not overtly doing this, but the workflow to deal with multiple tempos is so clumsy that the end result is the same. It would be nice if you could have a "tempo-agnostic" audio track that starts at a certain place & plays along until it's done & doesn't really care if the midi side of the house is changing tempos or not.

For real, I think that having a separate tempo track would make the most sense because you would have some a-priori knowledge about how to display the measures to keep everything to scale. Tempo change isn't really an "automation" feature: It's a core-structure-of-the-song kind of thing that's on a completely different level from just changing some pans or LFO parameters. You need to display a bar at 120bpm as a larger rectangle than one at 90bpm. Armed with this information you can then keep your audio in sync with your midi, draw a clean interface, & get rid of the stretching/shifting confusion that happens when the audio clip is suddenly redrawn or pitch-shifted at the point of a tempo change.